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Friday, 12 October 2012

Obama Was Born and Raised a Muslim

If anyone in the USA, for some extraordinary reason, is still in doubt about whom to choose for President, I recommend two things. The first is an empiricist approach: you have tried one candidate and he failed, you haven't tried the other. In experimental science it would be reasonable to choose the not-yet-tried possibility.

The second thing is, if you haven't already done so, to read "Obama's Muslim Childhood" by Daniel Pipes.

The discovery that Obama has been wearing for over 30 years a ring with the first part of the Islamic declaration of faith, the Shahada, “There is no god except Allah”, will make sense to you if you read it, because you'll realize how important Islam has been in the President's life. WND's Jerome R. Corsi, who has written several books on Obama, explains:

The Shahada is the first of the Five Pillars of Islam, expressing the two fundamental beliefs that make a person a Muslim: There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is Allah’s prophet.

Sincere recitation of the Shahada is the sole requirement for becoming a Muslim, as it expresses a person’s rejection of all other gods.

Egyptian-born Islamic scholar Mark A. Gabriel, Ph.D., examined photographs of Obama’s ring at WND’s request and concluded that the first half of the Shahada is inscribed on it.

“There can be no doubt that someone wearing the inscription ‘There is no god except Allah’ has a very close connection to Islamic beliefs, the Islamic religion and Islamic society to which this statement is so strongly attached,” Gabriel told WND.

Let's go back to Pipes' long and very well-researched article. After observing that the incumbent accuses his rival Romney of hiding some of his biographical details, it says: "A focus on openness and honesty are likely to hurt Obama far more than Romney. Obama remains the mystery candidate with an autobiography full of gaps and even fabrications".

A list of Obama's clashes with the truth and inaccuracies about himself - like "He lied about never having been a member and candidate of the 1990s Chicago socialist New Party", or his claim that he was born in Kenya - follows, before Pipes gets to the main topic of his essay, which is Obama and his campaign's lies about Obama's Muslim childhood.

The President, repeatedly although in a contradictory fashion, has denied having ever been a Muslim.

Pipes, through a painstaking fact-finding work, shows that Obama was born and raised as a Muslim, and while in Indonesia he went to Koranic classes "studying 'how to pray and how to read the Koran,' but also actually praying in the Friday communal service right on the school grounds", attended the local mosque, wore sarongs, garments that in Indonesian culture only Muslims wear, and took part in advanced Islamic religious lessons which included the difficult task of reciting the Koran in Arabic. None of this was inevitable, because in Indonesia ""Muslim students were taught by a Muslim teacher, and Christian students were taught by a Christian teacher".

In summary, the record points to Obama having been born a Muslim to a non-practicing Muslim father and having lived for four years in a fully Muslim milieu under the auspices of his Muslim Indonesian stepfather. For these reasons, those who knew Obama in Indonesia considered him a Muslim.

"My Muslim Faith"

In addition, several statements by Obama in recent years point to his Muslim childhood.

(1) Robert Gibbs, campaign communications director for Obama's first presidential race, asserted in Jan. 2007: "Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago." But he backtracked in Mar. 2007, asserting that "Obama has never been a practicing Muslim." By focusing on the practice as a child, the campaign is raising a non-issue for Muslims (like Jews) do not consider practice central to religious identity. Gibbs added, according to a paraphrase by Watson, that "as a child, Obama had spent time in the neighborhood's Islamic center." Clearly, "the neighborhood's Islamic center" is a euphemism for "mosque"; spending time there again points to Obama's being a Muslim.

Particularly crucial is the section of the article concerning how Obama interacts with - I was temped to say "fellow" - Muslims, acting as if they were indeed his coreligionists. He acts and tells them things that a Christian, as he says he is, would never do and say, like talking about Jesus as a dead prophet.

When addressing Muslim audiences, Obama uses specifically Muslim phrases that recall his Muslim identity. He addressed audiences both in Cairo (in June 2009) and Jakarta (in Nov. 2010) with "as-salaamu alaykum," a greeting that he, who went to Koran class, knows is reserved for one Muslim addressing another.

Obama, in addition, has an exaggerated sense of the importance of Islam and Muslims, to the point that he hugely "overestimates both the number and the role of Muslims in the United States," which "smacks of an Islamist mentality".

So it's not surprising that

Muslims cannot shake the sense that, under his proclaimed Christian identity, Obama truly is one of them.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the prime minister of Turkey, has referred to Hussein as a "Muslim" name. Muslim discussions of Obama sometimes mention his middle name as a code, with no further comment needed. A conversation in Beirut, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, captures the puzzlement. "He has to be good for Arabs because he is a Muslim," observed a grocer. "He's not a Muslim, he's a Christian," replied a customer. No, said the grocer, "He can't be a Christian. His middle name is Hussein." The name is proof positive.

The American Muslim writer Asma Gull Hasan wrote in "My Muslim President Obama":

I know President Obama is not Muslim, but I am tempted nevertheless to think that he is, as are most Muslims I know. In a very unscientific oral poll, ranging from family members to Muslim acquaintances, many of us feel … that we have our first American Muslim president in Barack Hussein Obama. … since Election Day, I have been part of more and more conversations with Muslims in which it was either offhandedly agreed that Obama is Muslim or enthusiastically blurted out. In commenting on our new president, "I have to support my fellow Muslim brother," would slip out of my mouth before I had a chance to think twice. "Well, I know he's not really Muslim," I would quickly add. But if the person I was talking to was Muslim, they would say, "yes he is."

Obama's middle name Hussein is again considered one of the reasons.

In conclusion, available evidence suggests that Obama was born and raised a Muslim and retained a Muslim identity until his late 20s. Child to a line of Muslim males, given a Muslim name, registered as a Muslim in two Indonesian schools, he read Koran in religion class, still recites the Islamic declaration of faith, and speaks to Muslim audiences like a fellow believer. Between his non-practicing Muslim father, his Muslim stepfather, and his four years of living in a Muslim milieu, he was both seen by others and saw himself as a Muslim.

This is not to say that he was a practicing Muslim or that he remains a Muslim today, much less an Islamist, nor that his Muslim background significantly influences his political outlook (which, in fact, is typical of an American leftist). Nor is there a problem about his converting from Islam to Christianity. The issue is Obama's having specifically and repeatedly lied about his Muslim identity. More than any other single deception, Obama's treatment of his own religious background exposes his moral failings.

Questions about Obama's Truthfulness

Yet, these failings remain largely unknown to the American electorate. Consider the contrast of his case and that of James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces. Both Frey and Obama wrote inaccurate memoirs that Oprah Winfrey endorsed and rose to #1 on the non-fiction bestseller list. When Frey's literary deceptions about his own drug taking and criminality became apparent, Winfrey tore viciously into him, a library reclassified his book as fiction, and the publisher offered a refund to customers who felt deceived.

In contrast, Obama's falsehoods are blithely excused; Arnold Rampersad, professor of English at Stanford University who teaches autobiography, admiringly called Dreams "so full of clever tricks—inventions for literary effect—that I was taken aback, even astonished. But make no mistake, these are simply the tricks that art trades in, and out of these tricks is supposed to come our realization of truth." Gerald Early, professor of English literature and African-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, goes further: "It really doesn't matter if he made up stuff. … I don't think it much matters whether Barack Obama has told the absolute truth in Dreams From My Father. What's important is how he wanted to construct his life."

How odd that a lowlife's story about his sordid activities inspires high moral standards while the U.S. president's autobiography gets a pass. Tricky Dick, move over for Bogus Barry.

Obama has a disproportionate desire to appeal to, as well as appease as we saw in the case of the Muhammed film, Muslims. The head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Charles F. Bolden, Jr., explained that Obama "wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering." Which incidentally is not even remotely as great as Obama seems to believe. But that's for another post.

It's up to Americans to decide if they want to re-elect a President who lies in matters of personal identity, especially religion, which has obvious, major ethical implications. In comparison, as Pipes points out, Romney's "prior tax returns, the date he stopped working for Bain Capital, and the non-public records from his service heading the Salt Lake City Olympics and as governor of Massachusetts" are of little importance.

And it's up to Americans to decide if they want to re-elect a President who has Muslim background and sympathies, in a world where the West's need to distance itself from the Islamic world, to reaffirm its values of democratic freedoms against a Muslim world that tries ever more aggressively to impose its Sharia's blasphemy laws on it, to recognize with dispassionate eyes potential enemies emerging from the "Arab Spring", and to deal with a nuclearizing Iran, increases by the day.

There is a saying: "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic". I was brought up a Catholic and I know that, although I consider myself now an atheist Christian, as Oriana Fallaci described herself, so, not believing in God, I am not a Catholic any more, family upbringing and childhood impressions remain with you all your life. I suspect the same applies to Obama, and all the above rich and detailed information confirms it.

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About Me

Philosophy graduate, journalist, website creator and
blogger born in Italy and living in London. I have been London correspondent for Italian media, including Panorama, L'Espresso, La
Repubblica. I translated Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation into Italian.